


8 Ways to Say I Love You

by blairstilinski



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 01:49:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7133642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blairstilinski/pseuds/blairstilinski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on http://thoughtcatalog.com/r-mckinley/2012/12/8-ways-to-say-i-love-you/</p>
            </blockquote>





	8 Ways to Say I Love You

**Author's Note:**

> Okay listen, I’m not gonna go on some big rant about all my writing insecurities. Just know that I am not a writer, I just need to write sometimes. Firstly, the part in this fic about Stiles and commas and rambling in writing. That’s the most auto-biographical thing I’ve ever written. Secondly, if you think that the first section is way different than all the other sections, it’s because I wrote it literally four months before the rest. Aka it’s shit but I didn’t want to rewrite. Thirdly, everyone knows I’m a slut for repetition, but forgive me that the first and third sections don’t follow the format of the others and I’m sorry. Fourthly, I overuse not only commas, but italics. Don’t be offended, I do this in real life too. Go back and read the first sentence of this A/N, it was a lie.

 

> _I // spit it into her voicemail, a little slurred and sounding like the shot whiskey you downed for courage_

“Stiles, I don’t think tha-” Stiles’ hand shot up to swat his Scott’s away, stumbling far enough away that his best friend couldn’t interfere.  He listened to the phone ring for the third time, too wasted to understand that she wouldn’t answer her phone at three am, and pissed that she wasn’t picking up.  All the anger went away at the sound of her voice, though.  

 _“This is Lydia, you know what to do!”_ at the beep, words came tumbling out of his mouth faster than they passed through his mind.

“Lydia! Lydia, Lyds.  You should be here.  It’s so much fun, Derek’s dancing.  Did you hear that, Derek is dancing.  It’s incredible.  It’s horrible, but it’s incredible. Plus it only took like 3 drinks for Malia and Isaac to start making out.  That’s gotta be a record so maybe they’ll start doing it sober soon.  Anyway, I called to tell you something… oh yeah.  I love you! I fucking love you and I wish that you were here and three drinks in and making out with me.  Scott told me not to call you but I couldn’t wait to tell you that I love you.  Kay so sleep well, see you tomorrow or whenever, I love you.”

She replays the message four times on the way to school, half the amount of times she listened to it upon waking up, a tenth of the times she listened to it yesterday when she was supposed to be at the pack meeting.  She’d stopped listening to the message from Kira asking where she was half way through in favor of listening to Stiles’ message again.  She hears the pounding music of the club and Scott yelling in the background and the slur of Stiles’ words and she struggles to face the fact that he probably didn’t mean any of it.  That he was drunk and she was on his speed dial and that just because she’s been waiting ages to hear what he was saying doesn’t mean he’s been waiting ages to say it.  

She shifts her car into park and takes a deep breath before getting out and walking over to the spot where she sees the rest of the pack.  Malia and Liam are in a heated argument over something that Lydia can’t decipher, probably an argument carried over from the meeting she missed.  Kira and Scott both greet her with smiles, although Kira’s is more welcoming and Scott’s is a little more sympathetic.  Isaac’s too busy interjecting ‘yeah’ after Malia’s statements to even notice that Lydia walked up.  Mason is mysteriously missing, but Lydia doesn’t question it because she’s too busy staring at Stiles, who absolutely refuses to meet her eye, or even look her way, murmuring only a quiet ‘hey’ at her entrance.

This goes on for a few days, with Lydia upset because Stiles won’t talk to her, Stiles embarrassed because he drunkenly confessed his love to a girl who doesn’t care, and Scott trying not to punch his best friends in the face as he tries to get them to talk to one another.

Eventually, Scott gets the brunette and strawberry blonde in a room together, Derek’s kitchen to be precise, and hurries away before either of them notice that they’re alone.  Lydia decides ‘fuck it’ and starts talking to Stiles, resolving to not care if he responds or not.  She talks to him about the physics book she’s reading and how awkward Malia and Isaac are getting for about 15 minutes before Stiles realizes that she must not have ever checked her messages.  In the middle of a joke about Isaac wrapping his arm around Malia yesterday, Stiles relaxes and laughs, causing Lydia’s head to whip up in shock.  He winces and she beams at him.  They don’t come out of the kitchen for almost an hour and when they do, Scott looks at them expectantly.  Soon it becomes apparent that all they did for that hour was devise a complicated plan to get Malia and Isaac to stop being idiots while making Derek as uncomfortable as possible, and Scott decides that making them talk about the voicemail can wait, thinks maybe Lydia will bring it up herself, later.

She won’t.

 

> _II // sigh it into her mouth, wedged between teeth and tongues_

Three weeks later, Stiles finds himself opening his front door to let Lydia into his house.  If he’s honest with himself, he’s been waiting all week for this moment.  For the past couple of months, he and Lydia had been spending Friday nights together, alternating between each other’s houses.  Some weeks Scott joined them, occasionally other members of the pack, but usually it was just them two.  It had started out innocent enough, Stiles found that he was better at concentrating on his school work when Lydia was around, and so the strawberry blonde had started doing her homework alongside him.  About three weeks into these study sessions they decided to order Chinese food.  The next week, it was Chinese food and reruns of The Bachelor after they’d finished their work.  By the end of the month, the studying was completely out the window and Friday became Stiles and Lydia’s movie night.  On this particular night, when Stiles swung open the door, he found Lydia standing there, with a smirk on her face, holding not one, but all seven Star Wars movies.  It only took a moment until the boy’s face lit up in a grin and he picked her up and spun her around.  A second later, he put her down, both of them blushing and avoiding eye contact a little awkwardly as they walked into the living room where the various boxes of Chinese food were scattered, Gilmore Girls style.  

They were halfway through Attack of the Clones, when the air changed.  Lydia’s head was resting on Stiles’ shoulder, and she was rolling her eyes every two minutes because he wouldn’t stop comparing the prequels to the originals.  She lifted her face up to counter his current comment about Padme vs Leia, but her argument was caught in her throat as she realized how close their faces were.  They stared at each other for a beat before she surged forward and pressed her lips to his.  

Stiles’ heart started beating so fast he was sure he was going to black out.  It took him a second to reciprocate, causing Lydia’s breath to falter, almost pulling away from the boy.  But before she could move, his hands were cupping her cheeks, pulling her closer to him so that there was no space between their bodies, so that every breath she breathed out, he had to breathe in.  In seconds he’s slipped her tongue between her lips, earning an embarrassingly low moan.  Lydia heard him chuckle, but she was too far gone to care, shifting her body so that she was straddling him, resulting in a sharp intake of breath from the brunette.  She pulled back, ever so slightly, to smirk at him.  “Shut up,” Stiles muttered, pulling her lips back to him.  

She doesn’t know how long they’re there, fumbling lips against lips, accidental bites and whispered apologies.  All she knows is that she’s happy, she’s so happy.  And then it happens.

“ _I love you_ ,”  he says and she stills.  It’s so quiet, it’s so small, but it’s there.  Or maybe not.  She’s still frozen but he acts as if nothing happened, lips pressing as fervently as before.  She thinks she must have imagined it.

“ _I love you_ ,” he says and his heart stops.  He hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t meant to let it slip from the carefully constructed cage it’s sat in for the past ten years.  She stills and he doesn’t, he pretends that nothing has happened, hoping she’ll overlook it, forget it.  She reanimates and he thinks maybe she has.

She hasn’t.

 

> _III // feel like your actions are more suited to a proposal than the simple confession of something you’ve always known_

After that night they’re together.  They don’t label it, don’t ever say that they’re boyfriend and girlfriend.  Maybe it goes without saying.  He brings her flowers one day at school and her cheeks turn the colour of her hair, but he’s smiling brighter than she’s ever seen him and so she takes the flowers and kisses him softly.  Jackson, she thinks, never brought her flowers, never even thought she might like them.  The flowers sit in a vase on her bedroom table until she comes home and her mother has thrown them away.  

She stays home from school one day, and he’s at her house thirty minutes into first period with a box of chocolates.  She cries and blames it on the PMS and not the fact that the first thought in her mind is that Aiden never even noticed when she wasn’t at school.

He takes her to a carnival, it’s cheesy and she kind of hates it, but she’ with him so it doesn’t matter.  He knocks over all of the bottles in one go, grinning at her broadly as he fist pumps the air.  She laughs loudly and doesn’t care that she’s being stared at.  He presents her with the giant teddy bear and she feels like she’s on top of the world.  It makes up for every stuffed animal her father forgot to buy her.

They go out to dinner and the menu is all in French.  She can tell that he doesn’t know what he’s ordering, and almost laughs at the look on his face when the frog legs are placed in front of him.  But she doesn’t because the restaurant is quiet and she doesn’t think the walls have ever contained a laugh.  He doesn’t eat the frog legs, but picks off of her plate, and she’s happy to let him.  She spends more time watching him than she does eating.  They barely talk because no one else in the restaurant is.  She hates it.  The place isn’t them.  They’re rapid fire conversations and loud laughter.  All she wants to do it to tell him about the stupid question someone asked in fifth period, the text Malia showed her from Isaac - proving that their plan had worked.  He asks for the check quickly, looking a little faint at the price, and she smiles before sliding over her credit card.  

When they leave, he immediately loosens his tie, slinging an arm over her shoulder.  She lets out all of the laughs she’d contained for the past hour and a half and he kisses her hard in return.  She tells him about fifth period and about the text, and he replies with as much enthusiasm as she’d hoped.  

As they get in the car, he hopes that she knows how much he loves her.  Hopes that she smells it in the flowers, tastes it in the chocolate, sees in it the bear.  He can’t say it because he’s so afraid to lose her.  He can’t say it because he’s said it too many times to no avail.  He can’t say it, not yet, but he hopes she can tell.  He hopes he knows why he’s holding back the words.

She doesn’t.

 

> _IV // whisper it into her hair in the middle of the night_

He’s been counting her breaths for the past forty-five minutes.  She’s lying, curled into him, wearing only his t-shirt.  He’s breathing in her strawberry shampoo and counting.  It’s not even close to the first time that she’s slept over, it’s not even the first time she’s slept over as his girlfriend, but it’s the first time he hasn’t been able to fall asleep with her beside him.  Usually he can’t sleep without her, lost without the feeling of her back against his chest, her fingers laced with his.  When he does manage to sleep without her, he wakes up in the middle of the night, terror tearing through his body, screams ripping through the air.  She doesn’t fare much better without him.

But tonight, tonight it’s not the fear of monsters and death that keeps him awake.  He’s not picturing Allison’s body on the ground, not imagining the first time he thought Scott was dead, not hearing his mother’s voice echoing through his head.  This time, he’s hearing one thing, coursing through his mind, out of it’s cage but not out of his mouth. _I love you, I love you, I love you._  He says it in his head like a mantra, to keep from saying it out loud.   _I love you, I love you, I love you._

But it wants to be said, it _needs_ to be said.  It’s sick of being pushed to the side in favor of other words, in favor of kisses.  It’s sick of being feared, it’s sick of his insecurity.  So he counts her breaths.  And _finally_ when he’s _sure_ she’s asleep, when her breaths are even and her heart beating steadily, he presses his lip into her hair and he lets it free.

“ _I love you,_ ”  he say and she hears it loud and clear, wills her heart not to skip a beat, prays her breath doesn’t falter.  He has to believe that she’s asleep, that he’s the only one who heard his confession.  But it’s been so long since she’s heard him say it.  So long that she’s begun to think that every time before was a mistake, that his tongue slipped, that she’s the only one who feels it.

“ _I love you,_ ” he says and his head stops pounding.  His arm tightens around her and his whole body relaxes.  Then, she turns ever so slightly in his arms, just enough that her face is now parallel to his, he can see it’s relaxed features.  He holds his breath for ten seconds, twenty, and then breathes out. _It’s okay_ , he thinks to himself, _she’s asleep_.

She isn’t.

 

> _V // blurt it out in the middle of an impromptu dance party in the kitchen, as clumsy as your two left feet_

He’s singing loudly to a Taylor Swift song and she can’t stop laughing.  Her hair is messy on the top of her head and her bare feet pound the floor as she jumps up and down.  It’s in this moment that she realizes she’s never felt this _free_.  The sauce on the stove is burning, she can smell it, but she doesn’t really care.  Stiles grabs the wooden spoon out of the pot, flinging red onto the floor, but it only makes her laugh louder as he begins to sing into it.  One of his arms is around her and she’s jumping and spinning all at once and she’s sure that no one has ever been this happy.

“ _I love you,_ ”  he says, and her feet stop moving.  She’s standing still, one of his arms still wrapped around her, staring into his wide eyes.  She thinks there’s never been a more perfect moment then this.

“ _I love you_ ,” he says and she halts to a stop.  The spoon falls to the ground as he scrambles for a way out.  His mind is in panic mode, she’s staring at him and all he can think is _this is where I lose her_.  They were having a good moment, a perfect moment, and he had to go and ruin it by making it too serious.  He sees her mouth open and quickly speaks before she can react. “-in that colour,” he adds, nodding to the olive sweats she’s wearing.  She looks down and bites her lip,  he turns back to the pot and pulls the burnt sauce off the heat.  She bends down and picks the spoon off of the ground.  He hopes she doesn’t think he meant to ruin their perfect moment, he hopes she can believe that he was talking about the sweatpants all along.

She can’t.

 

> _VI // write her a letter in which the amount of circumnavigating and angst could rival Mr. Darcy’s_

He’s on her bad side and everyone knows it.  Scott throws him pitiful glances across the lunch table, Liam gives him knowing looks during pack meetings, even Malia gives him a sympathetic smile in the hallway.  When they walk together, they don’t talk.  When they eat together, she leaves when she’s done.  When they sleep together, she stays on her side of the bed.  

She’s just so _angry_ at him.  He loves her and everyone knows it, so why won’t he say it to her face.  In a drunken voicemail, no problem.  In her sleep, sure.  But never when he has to deal with the emotion.  She’s just _so_ angry.  She wants the chance to say it back, she wants to look him in the eyes when he says it and know that he means it.  She wants him to know she means it too, because she does, _God_ , she does.  Distancing herself from him is a defense mechanism.  She so sick of not saying it.  She’s so sick of him not saying it.

The distancing means that Stiles has a lot more time to think, and _boy_ does that suck.  He has to think about all of the reasons that his girlfriend could be angry with him and he keeps coming back to one.  And he’s just so _angry_ with himself for not being able to say it to her face.  Everytime he thinks he might, he imagines what will happen if she hears it and realizes she doesn’t feel the same way.  Rationally, he knows that she loves him back.  But it’s the little voice in the back of his head, sending anxiety coursing through his veins when it says maybe she doesn’t.  He’s just _so_  angry that the little voice has such a power over him.

He has to get her to talk to him, though.  If she doesn’t, he’s for sure going to explode.  So he sits down and he writes.  In all honesty, writing has never been his best form of communication.  He tends to ramble when speaking, and writing isn’t much different.  Every sentence contains comma after comma of thoughts he simply can’t contain to a reasonable length.  But he manages, he writes it all down, all thirteen pages, and he puts it in an envelope and scribbles her name on it.

“ _I love you,_ ” she reads, plain in the middle of the first page.  She devours the other twelve, scratches of apologies and ten years of thoughts and she can’t stop the tears the flow down her cheeks.

“ _I love you,_ ” he wrote, plain in the middle of the first page.  He struggles, two days, with how to give it to her.  It sits in his pocket, slightly crumpled from being removed and replaced for forty-eight hours.  Her pillow is too cheesy, coat pocket too risky, locker too informal.  He ends up throwing it in his trash can in a fit of anxiety.  An hour later he carefully turns it over, so that her name is facing upwards.   _Maybe_ , he thinks, _she'll see see it_.  But part of him still hopes she’ll overlook it.

She doesn’t.

 

> _VII // wait until something terrible has happened and you can’t not tell her anymore_

He’s running through the hospital, tripping over his own feet every few steps, running into several people in his path.  Scott called him only ten minutes ago, the longest ten minutes of his life.  He _finally_ bursts through the door of her room.  There are so many machines attached to her and everything in the room is beeping.  He doesn’t even notice her mother by her bed or Scott in the corner.  When Scott said the car _almost_ hit her, he’d imagined a shaken up Lydia, crying and maybe a little bruised.  This was a broken Lydia, unconscious and more than a little bruised.  He feels like he can’t breathe, like he might never breathe again if she doesn’t open her eyes.

 _“I love you_ ,” he says as he takes her hand.  Maybe it’s his imagination when the heart monitor picks up at the exact moment the words come out of his mouth.  He regrets every day, every second that he didn’t tell her before.  He was so stupid to think that saying it would result in losing her, as if he’d known what it felt like to almost truly lose her.

“ _I love you_ ,” he says and he prays to every deity there is that she can hear him.

She can’t.

 

> _VIII // say it deliberately, your tongue a springboard for every syllable_

He doesn’t say it the moment she wakes up.  He’s too overwhelmed with relief to say anything at all.  He’s kissing her and she’s laughing because she thinks he’s overreacting, like he didn’t just see his life without her flash before his eyes.  It turns out she was only out for an hour in the long run, not nearly long enough to merit the panic that Stiles had gone to.  Quite a reasonable, length actually, for someone who’s been hit by a car ( _almost_ , Scott?).  

Her hand is in his and he’s certain it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world.  They’re walking down the street, the same way they do every Saturday morning, a coffee in each of their hands.

“I love you,” he says and she smiles into her coffee cup. She turns her head ever so slightly so that her green eyes meet his hazel ones.  Her grip on his hand tightens as she realizes he’s not going to take it back, not going to ignore the moment.  She laughs more loudly than she ever has before.

“I love you,” he says and he almost jumps off the ground when she laughs.  He’s looking into a sea of green and all he wants for the rest of his life is for her to say it back.  

She does.


End file.
